Abolish The TV Licence Fee

Everyone who reads this post – Please take the action it advises.

Put Personal Name & Address here
Put Date Here.
Sir Michael Lyons
The Chairman, By 1st Class Post
BBC, Recorded Delivery.
Broadcast centre,
201 Wood lane,
London
W12 7TP

Dear Sir Michael Lyons

Re: The Royal Charter of the BBC, & the Treason & Felony Act, 1848

Notice Before Action.

It has been brought to my attention that the Corporation has received and is now receiving substantial amounts of funding from the European Union, in breach of Charter Provisions, and that in consequence of this very suspect arrangement the BBC is now reduced to the function of providing both broadcasting & propaganda facilities to a form of alien authority that fails to acknowledge the Supreme Authority of the British Crown.

I must advise you that all such conduct serves to breach the provisions of the Treason Act, 1351 with the further provisions of the Treason & Felony Act, 1848.

In addition, I must advise that the Treason & Felony Act of 1848 provides that it is a Criminal Offence for Subjects of the Crown to give aid or comfort to Traitors, and that this offence is punishable by imprisonment for life.

I am concerned for my own position and I must ask you to cease and desist from all treacherous conduct & financial arrangements, without delay.

Unless I receive your written assurance that the Corporation will issue an immediate public apology for all Treason committed thus far, with your further guarantee that the Corporation will cease and desist from all and any conduct that fails to maintain the Supremacy of the British Crown, then I must give fair warning of my intention to discontinue the payment of all such moneys as are now being applied to the financial support of the BBC.

I look forward to receipt of your immediate response to this present letter and I give notice that payments in support of the BBC will be suspended, unless I receive a satisfactory response within 14 days of this present date.

Yours faithfully,

(Sign Here)

and then Letter 2

Put Personal Name & Address here
Put Date Here.
Sir Michael Lyons
The Chairman, By 1st Class Post
BBC, Recorded Delivery.
Broadcast centre,
201 Wood Lane,
London
W12 7TP

Dear Sir Michael Lyons
Re: The Royal Charter of the BBC, & the Treason & Felony Act, 1848

Notice Before Action.
Your records will show that I have not received a satisfactory reply to my letter of the ???????, and I must now advise that I am no longer able to support the BBC.
As from today, all payments in respect of a television licence have been cancelled.

Yours faithfully,
(Sign Here)

Guest Blogger – Stephen Roche

Christ knows why I did not turn it off, but I’ve just had the misfortune to watch a piece on The One Show all the way through. First time for everything I suppose!

I could not believe what I saw and heard, the BBC had the cheek and audacity to criticise the way breakdown operators and insurance companies do business in an attempt to retain customers. The BBC accusing other companies of acting in a less than honest fashion, the words pot, kettle and black spring to mind. 

Firstly, I love the way that The AA,who seemed to receive special treatment in this piece were not given the opportunity to reply. A bit more biased journalism from the BBC, that is if you can call Dom the mockney barrow boy a journalist. 

Whether you approve of what these insurance companies do, they have to do business in the real world. They have to attract and retain custom in a competitive market place. They don’t have to rely on an unjust law which states if you don’t pay us we’ll prosecute you, regardless of whether you use our service or not. Think of one other business that legally employs a private army of wannabe bailiffs who gain access to your property illegally and intimidate you into handing over your hard earned money.

Dom the consumer champion then went on to advise everyone to contact their insurers before their next policy renewal to try and get a discount and play on their customer loyalty. I wonder what would happen if we all contact the BBC and demand a discount when your licence comes up for renewal. See you all in court!

Guest Blogger – Trefor Hopkins

I admit that I might have (before I ditched cable) watched old bbc reruns on certain channels, and yes, i listen to certain national BBC radio stations.

Apart from that I basically want a TV to watch DVD’s on. There is almost nothing on terrestrial worth watching often enough to bother with. Game shows, reality shows sports and soaps are not even remotely on my radar. Take these away and you have very little left.

The legal argument is based on the TV being capable of receiving therefore you must pay. This is ‘guilty til proven innocent’ which is at odds with the rest of British Law.

I accept that it costs money to produce national radio stations and have no problem with paying for them. I don’t want to pay to watch telly that I only ever turn on to play DVDs though.

Guest Blogger – Robert Winter – London

In 1996 I was employed by BBC News. At that time I was asked to help build the contracts between BBC News and Current Affairs and the BBC Corporate centre and BBC Worldwide, the sales arm. This involved how much money was paid in advance by BBC Worldwide to each of the programme makers as an advance. For Panorama for example, BBC Worldwide would offer x thousand pounds for all rights in all media in perpetuity for the forthcoming season of Panorama. My job was to gauge exactly what the commercial value of that would be to a commercial distributor. Without question or exception the true value of this programme series, and most others across all genre of the BBC at that time, would be ten times in excess of the value placed on it by the BBC’s own internal selling division, BBC Worldwide.
Not only that, when Panorama was sold across the world, the revenues were not returned to the series programme makers, but just put into the general pot. So the following year Panorama again had to fight for decent funding. Niot only were the programme makers deprived of good value and valuable programme making funds, the licence fee payer was deprived of true value by getting a true financial return for the programmes they were watching and paying for via the licence fee.
The core of the problem is that BBC Worldwide was one of the most inefficient programme sales companies at that time, and not only squandered much of the programme sales revenues, most of the money it did bring in, simply did not go back to the programme makers that our licence fees were paying. Had this been more efficient and at true commercial value, then the BBC would simply not need the huge hikes in licence fees that it has been demanding.

I hate this stereotype of students having silly amounts of money, being able to go out and get ratarsed every day of the week, then sitting down, watching TV and never doing anything. I actually find it offensive.

I go out once, maybe twice a week, once down the SU where I spend not more than a tenner.

There are maybe 2 show I watch on TV, which I can watch just as easily on iPlayer or 4oD. And contrary to popular belief, students do actually have work to do. Whether they bother to do it or not is their business but while we’re not out with a drill or bricks and mortarfor 12 hours every day, nor are we bored out of our mind flipping burgers or boxing teacakes (not fruitcakes, breadcakes or fruit teacakes, the regular bread rolls you eat a chip butty in) or buns or whatever, but the average student does actually get the books out and does their essays. And you call centre jocks can bugger off anall, 50% of you assheads do less work than the least conscientious student! If you did, I wouldn’t be sat in a 3-hour queue on an 0845 number just to get through to your sorry ass to tell me that your company screwed up my gas bill AGAIN (which I already knew, or else I wouldn’t have called), but that there’s nothing you can do about it. And I know for a fact the student bar-workers will love getting some bugger else to pour THEIR drinks for them, while showing the barkeep the same contempt as they themselves are shown by every Tom, Dick and Harry who loves to badmouth students’ drinking habits.

We’re paying through the nose to try and better ourselves. And we go out a damn sight less than your average factory/call centre jock, and probably drink a lot less too, contrary to the crap the Daily Mail or the Mirror or the Sun (the ‘old favourites’) will tell you. Your average town centre on a Friday and Saturday night is NOT filled with students. Indeed, your average Wednesday night isn’t either in most places.

It’s all a pile of crap that those who have never been to uni like to spew. Like those who work at the TVLC/BBC. They’ve never been to uni. Oh wait, they studied Extortion at Oxford.

I agree, students shouldn’t have to pay TV license. Mostly because I think NOBODY should have to pay one. And yes, to bring it back to the ORIGINAL point, that ‘crappy excuses’ and the ‘ways to pay’ patronising bullshit is utterly offensive to students. I consider it an insult to my intelligence and I know many other students feel the same.

Guest Blogger – Stephie Dixon – Teesside Uni

In the SU bar we have been bombarded with adverts of bad excuses given to dodge out of paying the licence, done by the tv licencing. I just a few weeks ago was asked to record an excuse for them, which was not why i didn’t pay but when someone from the department came round asked why was my sheep wearing a tiara. I did this for free and hope it will never be aired. stupid thing for me to do i know but i’m going off track.
They are always harping on about excuses we give them of not paying well to be frank i’m tired of their excuses they give to make us pay.
“We realise that £139.50 is a lot of money on a student budget. So we’ve made sure there are lots of different ways you can pay.” …. oh how nice of them…how about if they introduce a discount scheme. i mean we get discount when we go to the cinema, in clothes shops, food outlets… we don’t pay council tax (thank god) so give us a discount at the very least. if they know that it is a lot of money then do something about it!!

then their next excuse is..
“The good news is you can apply for a refund if you find that you don’t need your TV Licence for any full three-month period of cover remaining on it” what if you haven’t got a full 3 months? why can’t they do a 9 month student package? saves so much hassel for the both parties, because whoever is wanting to cancel it has to write in and lord knows i’m terrible at getting down to the post office and im sure they know that many people are and it suits them fine. why can’t we call up and cancel? a simple student offer of a 9 month deal at a reduced price would make them more popular! i mean them stopping it would make them even more popular but lets get a reality check, they won’t so they should do a student offer. what do you think?

Guest Blogger – Sabrina Purchasse – London

Unfortunately I stopped paying by direct debit- was then told i’d actually paid for a year in advance and had to fill out a form for a refund. It took over a month to recieve the payment of 79 pounds.

The desision came after sky wanted us to pay 100 pounds to get a new sky plus box along with the 40 quid a month so that we could watch cbeebies all day with the kids! In milton keynes there is some freeview there is also a virgin (was ntl) cable service which u pay 1.75 a month for and recieve 4 channels.

As our last sky boxes lasted less than a month each time we decided we wouldnt renew our contract or buy a new box just to recieve freeview. As freeview isnt guarenteed for the area we couldnt see the point in buying an aerial (milton keynes dont allow them) and a box and a tv licence the grant total of whihc amounts to the same as buying a sky box and a years subscription.

Absolute insanity How do they expect people to swap over to digital if they arn’t going to help the poorest of us to afford it– bring back analog!!!!

Why did everyone else stop was it purely cos the bbc air rubbish or was it cos you stopped watching all tv?

http://www.bbcmagazinesadvertising.com/index.html

BBC magazine reaches 88 million people per year, Here on this BBc owned site you can buy advertising space in the BBC magazine (funded by our BBC tax contribution)

This is the statement from the footer -

©BBC Worldwide Ltd

BBC magazines is owned by the BBC and our profits are returned to the BBC for benefit of the license payer

Go onto Google and put this in the search box

“is owned by the BBC” – include the quotes

if you look you can see that google has found 15,600 webpages that have this piece of text at the bottom of the page.

Almost every page i visited had adverts showing on it.

oh and lets not forget the BBC shop – http://www.bbcshop.com

Where we get the fantastic chance to pay for something we already paid for all over again

how much more am i going to dig up? im not even in BBC Troll mode yet haha

Taken from – http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/editorial/advertisingtheb.shtml

Advertising & the BBC brand

We should ensure that the BBC brand is not used to endorse outside companies or organisations. We can achieve this by ensuring that:

* commercial advertising or promotion by an outside company does not give the impression of BBC endorsement
* advertising does not “pass off” BBC programmes.

We will not normally allow the BBC name, logos, titles, channel names, programme titles, formats or characters to be used by commercial advertisers.

Any exception, for example, for a joint promotion of a BBC commercial product, must be formally agreed in accordance with the BBC Advertising and Joint Promotions Guidelines and the BBC Fair Trading Guidelines.

Taken from – http://www.bbcmagazinesadvertising.com/research.html

Research

BBC Worldwide has a dedicated research team to support the ad sales department across our magazine and online portfolio. Committed to delivering information and insight on an ad hoc and regular reporting basis, the research division analyses key markets and trends enabling BBC Worldwide’s media offering to evolve and grow.

By helping advertisers understand the relationship between print and digital they can tap into new and exciting audiences. This helps our clients grow their brands, build cohesive campaigns and utilise our various publications and websites effectively.

Dont they seem to ba a bit contradicting of each other? Has anyone been on any of these flagship BBC sites – All of them have adverts on the pages.

* bbcgoodfood.com
* bbcgreen.com
* gardenersworld.com
* radiotimes.com
* topgear.com

How much do you think the kids franchise is worth? All those toys on the shelves and tweenies dolls, teletubby costumes and stuff. Where does the money go? Oh yes it goes in the pot with the 2.4 BILLION each year from the TV TAX

* Balamory
* Bob the Builder
* CBeebies
* Cbeebies Animals
* CBeebies Art
* Charlie and Lola
* In the Night Garden
* Teletubbies
* Toybox
* Tweenies

WE ARE GETTING SHAFTED – GOOD AND PROPPER

Right last one then im going for dinner

Visit – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7664963.stm

Go to the bottom of the page – Everything seems normal. But… Look at this screen shot

At the bottom of the image you will see no mention of advertising with the BBC

Now lets play them at their own game, the BBC website uses a process called cloaking, this process takes information from the users web browser to determine the content that is displayed. In the case of the latter the system seen that i was a UK visitor and did not show me a link to the BBC advertising scheme.

So we are going to trick their system now, visit http://www.freeproxyserver.net/ (this website allows you to use a server in another country to surf the web)

Using this proxy site copy the same url (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7664963.stm) into the box and hit go. When the page loads up, go to the bottom. Whats there? Only a link “Advertise with us” – For a screenshot look here -

So the question i have to ask is -
Why would the BBC want to employ a system that does not show the fact that it advertises to the UK population?

What has it got to hide – Maybe it wants to hide the fact that they are taking us for a ride.

Guest Blogger – Jack Lai – Chelsea

I make no complaint about the existence of a licence to support a a strong, non commercial, dedicated, impartial, and accurate broadcasting corporation maintaining the utmost levels of integrity in everything they do. The BBC were renowned for their technical expertise and their ruthless impartiality and fairness. However, the BBC ain’t it any more and I do have strong feelings on the level of the licence fee currently and whether it represents value for money. There is no doubt in my mind that it does not as the BBC have departed from their central and impartial role in a desire to become more commercial and competitive. Their programming has now become fragmented and like a straw in the wind. A large number of their more controversial politically sensitive broadcasts now have the feel of government censorship. Since the unmitigated disaster of the news broadcast on the subject of weapons of mass destruction and the tragic death of that expert in the field I have always had doubts on the ability of the BBC to retain it’s independence from successive overbearing government influence in both it’s broadcasts and program content.

It makes sense to think about the heavy, above inflation fee increase as being caused by a massive rise in the number of minority interest or cult and ethnic based programs which have limited appeal to a wide general viewing audience. As said elsewhere the BBC have diluted their claim for a greater increase in the licence fee by obtaining lots of “back door” sponsorship which grinds with their commercial broadcasting counterparts and brings accusations of undue effects on advertising revenue

I was of the opinion that the BBC charter should not have been renewed in 2006. There is consistent evidence of BBC broadcasters persistently “talking up” the economy and other sensitive issues. As there is so much of this there is little doubt that central instructions are being given. The BBC or any other so called independent broadcaster must never be used in such a way.

It is a pity because we do need a British Broadcasting Corporation. We don’t need another series of TV (and it has to be said some of their radio) channels that we have to pay for that do the same thing as all the other ones that are self financing. Somewhere in this mess may be something worth saving that I would be happy to stump up something for, but I am fed up with watching Parliamentary sub committees who have no clue about the subject,rubber stamping the BBC charter in the face of mounting criticism and constructive comments from the commercial operators. But most of all I get pissed by the BBC managers, half of whom in the past proved themselves incompetent, but still retain their attitude of having an unequivocal right to their job and to do whatever they want to just because of who they are.

Personally I am sad to say that in spite of my love for some aspects of the BBC that struggle to remain as part of the mainstream programming and especially it’s local radio stations, I can no longer see any major reason to continue to support the renewal of the charter and consequently the licence fee while the BBC remains in its current form.

Changing the BBC status to self financing will force managers to become more focused.It’s either that or wield the axe heavily on the huge number of stations currently in operation

I have no connection with either the BBC or any commercial media company, but I have in the past worked with managers from the major TV channels and those also from the film industry

Guest Blogger -  Tristram Stuckey – Nottingham

I moved into my flat about two years ago. Two days after I moved in, the licencing people came knocking on my door to inform me that I didn’t have a licence. I told them I’d just moved in and they seemed fine with that and handed me a leaflet explaining all the ways I could pay. Once I realised how much it cost, I wrote to them and told them I didn’t need a licence as I did not watch or record television. For two years I have lived and entertained myself without one, by spending time online and learning new things. About a month ago I bought a TV and an X-box, and even plugged in my old DVD player that I’ve had for about eight years. They still write to me, and they still come knocking on my door when I’m out, but my life has been so much better without television. Last night I was asked to house sit for a friend as he didn’t want to leave his dogs all alone, so I thought I’d sit there and watch TV all night as he has a licence and all the Sky TV channels. I watched about thirty minutes of an old Top Gear and switched it off, as there was nothing I wanted to watch on. Living without television is hard at first, but people really are better off without it. If there was no licence fee, I’d probably get a freeview box or something, but I know I can live without it. I’m unemployed btw, and therefore I have plenty of time on my hands, so if I can do it, so can everyone else.